Archive for March 17th, 2012

The campaign to pressure advertisers to leave conservative Rush Limbaugh’s radio show after his misogynistic comments about a college student looks familiar – it was presaged six years ago in a similar effort directed at a San Francisco talk-radio station by an anonymous blogger called Spocko.

It’s always a good day when someone who has worked for justice gets noticed. A round of Guinness on the house.

When Florida Rep. Rachel Burgin (R- 56) introduced a bill in November calling on the federal government to reduce taxes for corporations (HM 685), she made an embarrassing mistake. Rep. Burgin was introducing a bill she had received from the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council. A bill written by the Tax Foundation, corporate members of ALEC’s ‘Tax and Fiscal Policy task force” and a group founded and funded by major corporate interests, including the billionaire Koch brothers.

All ALEC model resolutions contain a boilerplate paragraph, describing ALEC’s adherence to free market principles and limited government. When legislators introduce one of ALEC’s bills, they normally remove this paragraph. Sometimes (but only sometimes) legislators will make some slight alterations to anALEC model bill,perhaps to include something specific to them or to their state. Rep. Burgin didn’t do that. Instead she introduced a bill that was the same as the model word-for-word, forgetting even to remove the paragraph naming ALEC and describing its principles.

As a Texas Governor might say; “Oops!”

The next day, Rep. Burgin quickly withdrew the bill hoping that no one had noticed and then re-introduced it 24-hours later, with a new bill number (HM 717), but now without the problematic paragraph. Nobody seems to have noticed until now.

Here’s how HM 685 (now HM 717) originally started:

WHEREAS, it is the mission of the American Legislative Exchange Council to advance Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty, and

Burgin — or whichever of her staffers did the cut-and-paste job for her — gives the game away quite neatly.